[tedmiston]

Refreshing advice: Work on a problem you care about and don't worry about the rest until it's working.

> Sam: So you were 19 when you started Facebook. One question we hear a lot at Y Combinator is, "I'm 19 today. I really want to do whatever I can to make the world better. What should I do?"

> Mark: I always think that the most important thing that entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working, and I think that...if you look at the data of the very best companies that have gotten built, I actually think a tremendous percent of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into some local minimum a lot of the time. A local maximum, sorry.

[JamesBarney]

Donating to a http://www.givewell.org/ recommended charity is probably a more scalable way to make the world a better place.

[mathattack]

Creating a company that gives people jobs and provides customers with a positive NPV service or product also makes the world a better place. A successful company can tremendous value to the world, even if it only provides a fraction of that for the owner to give to charity.

[ItsMattyG]

I suspect it's probably a wash. Donating to a Givewell charity has less risk certainly, but a successful startup on the order of Facebook will change the world by multiple orders of magnitude more. The expected value is probably similar.

[erintumeran]

People overestimate the positive impact of technology. Of course in Silicon Valley you're considered crazy if you don't believe technology solves everything. But it's not as simple as that. My grandparents for example, had no internet, no Facebook, no iPhones. They're doing great and have led very fulfilling lives. Most of the positivity in their lives came from their relationship with each other and their kids. Of course they are only one example, and that is not a lot of data. But we know that there are millions of people in Silicon Valley right now who have the fastest internet, the most amazing social media apps, they are young and can take advantage of all the modern technology in existence, and yet they might feel isolated and be totally depressed in their lives.

[ItsMattyG]

>People overestimate the positive impact of technology. Of course in Silicon Valley you're considered crazy if you don't believe technology solves everything. But it's not as simple as that. My grandparents for example, had no internet, no Facebook, no iPhones. They're doing great and have led very fulfilling lives. Most of the positivity in their lives came from their relationship with each other and their kids. Of course they are only one example, and that is not a lot of data. But we know that there are millions of people in Silicon Valley right now who have the fastest internet, the most amazing social media apps, they are young and can take advantage of all the modern technology in existence, and yet they might feel isolated and be totally depressed in their lives.

I mean, technology is probably not going to make rich people's lives better at this point unless it removes some substantial annoyance. I suspect that like money, there's diminishing returns after a certain point.

But, for someone who has never had internet before, to get connected (one of Mark's three stated goals in the video) is life changing.

[an_ko]

It comes down to definitions. What is "positive impact" to you? To me, it means "increasing the total amount of human understanding", not "making everybod happy and Amish".

Edit: By the way, this is the essential difference between Bentham's and Mill's versions of utilitarian philosophy, if you'd like to research further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Utilitarianis...

[quxbar]

I'd like to barge in and call false dichotomy on this. Despite the excellent citation, I don't think it's correct. I believe technology should let people enjoy more of their lives, not replace it. Understanding is essential to this, but it becomes cheaper as your technology improves, so you're not sacrificing happiness at a fixed rate. We've already gone from industrial steam engines to tiny glass wonder-phones in a couple hundred years, what if technology continues to become less intrusive? Maybe we'll all be look amish yet be omnipotent.

[meric]

human knowledge != human understanding.

You can read about humans, to understand humans you have to form relationships with them and experience them yourself. An analogy would be reading K&R compared to bashing against GCC.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It remains to be proven that Facebook's contribution is positive.

See e.g. http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/is-facebook-luring-you-into...

[tim333]

Trouble with giving to charities is it's not very personal. Ok you may increase the world's anti malaria budget from $1.5bn to $1.50001bn but you can't turn around and say look at this cool thing I built.

[sangnoir]

Building a cool thing and changing the world are two very different things. Some individuals sincerely believe that working on any startup is intrinsically altruistic and 'changes the world' - Silicon Valley (the TV show) lampoons this and correctly so. You are not "making the world a better place through minimal message-oriented transport layers"

[tim333]

Although the things that have changed the world have generally been cool. Tech like the electric motor, jet aviation, the printing press. Also intellectual works like those of Keynes or Marx. Less so with charitable donations. Personally I'm thinking of trying stuff and figure I've got more of a chance of making a difference by innovating rather than donating a bit.

[briantmaurer]

In order for givewell.org to exist, somebody had to start that company.

[gordon_freeman]

Okay so I don't agree with "don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working" part.

Airbnb example comes to mind where all the founders exhausted all their credit cards to fund user acquisitions and when that did not work kept trying other innovative means to keep the company afloat. If they would have followed this advice, there would not have been an AirBnB.

I agree with the part that says " entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about" and keep pursuing it with perseverance. Because then companies like AirBnB are built. Just saying.

[noblethrasher]

During an interview[1] (with one of the AirBnB founders no less), pg offered the general advice that startups should search for success using a hill climbing algorithm, and not worry about dangerous local maximums; only to be immediately confronted with the counter example of AirBnB (the cereal episode).

That company just seems to be an outlier in multiple categories.

[1] http://youtu.be/nrWavoJsEks at about 7:00

[jacquesm]

Which is amusing if you realize that VC depends on outliers in order to make it to the next cycle.

In other words: the only worthwhile companies for VCs are the ones that do not follow the set patterns and to which the rules do not apply.

[tim333]

I'm not sure the AirBnB guys with hindsight would have followed that policy again. They may have been better tweaking the model till it seemed to work rather than maxing the credit cards on a non working model perhaps. They were kind of failing and losing money till joining YC so the pre YC strategy may not have been great.

[zouhair]

And also be extremely lucky.

[eatkinson]

"I find that the major objection is that people think great science is done by luck. It's all a matter of luck. Well, consider Einstein. Note how many different things he did that were good. Was it all luck? Wasn't it a little too repetitive? Consider Shannon. He didn't do just information theory. Several years before, he did some other good things and some which are still locked up in the security of cryptography. He did many good things. You see again and again, that it is more than one thing from a good person. Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, 'Luck favors the prepared mind.' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not."

--R.W. Hamming

[metaphorm]

scientific discoveries and social network websites aren't in the same class and this reasoning doesn't apply to the latter.

[ItsMattyG]

The same reasoning can be applied to be people like Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk who have made several billion dollar companies.

[metaphorm]

can it? explain.

[ItsMattyG]

The fact that they were able to replicate their success multiple times, just like Einstein, and that they're all smart, just like Einstein, says that there's probably some aspect of talent involved in their success.

If it was purely based on luck, without any talent involved, you'd expect billion dollar companies to be more evenly distributed, and not cluster among certain individuals.

[dev1n]

scientific discoveries are the result of iterations upon leads and ideas, most of which require time spent doing lots of different things. Which I think is the heart of what Hamming is getting to.

[jomamaxx]

There was a lot of luck in Facebook, even if Zuck is a particularly talented individual.

Also - if Harvard is a great school - how the F does someone find time to do the work and make a product at the same time?

When I did Engineering, I didn't have time to take a shower.

[optforfon]

Some people are just much better organized. I studied physics at a pretty good school. A lot of my classmates were very smart and hard workings. We spend easily 8 hours a day doing problem sets. Then we had an exchange student who cam from France (from the Prepas system) and he was just so much more organized with his work. He would sit down and very carefully read the chapter, make sure he understood everything. Then work through each problem carefully and then spend the rest of the day relaxing. Till he was done he wouldn't get distracted, check his phone, shoot the shit classmates. Just a very focused mind.

Looking back at college it was easily 80% worrying about doing work and 20% actually doing it. With something like programming, knowing how to use a debugger, profiler and an IDE give you a huge leg up. Easily 95% of CS students never take the time to learn the tools b/c you have to do it on your own time - but you have other homework to stress out about.

[dntrkv]

You can say that about any successful person/company.

Sure, luck may have played a large role in Facebook's initial success. But that was over 10 years ago. Many companies experience that initial success and then go nowhere, e.g. MySpace. Facebook, on the other hand, has continuously surpassed everyone's expectations. It's not until recently that people have began to accept that Facebook is here to stay. Discounting Facebook's repeated successes as luck is just silly.

Building a $350B company does not happen from luck, it requires a constant stream of good decision making.

[cookiecaper]

I agree that the luck angle needs to be tempered by considering that there are many ways to accidentally destroy a good thing. It should also be recognized that luck is required to prevent other, bigger companies from catching on to you before you're big enough to stand up for yourself.

I don't want to discount merit or work, but we too often seriously discount luck. Luck plays a large part in every success. That's not to say that people are justified in being unsuccessful; it's just to recognize that we're all involved in something larger than ourselves.

As failure doesn't always correlate to incompetence, success doesn't always correlate to competence.

[zouhair]

Of course it is luck. When they decide to do something new they never know if it's gonna work. If it doesn't work out or if it does work out tons of people come afterwards with tales of "they were stupid if they thought that was the answer" or "These people are smart and they surely knew what they were doing".

I am not trying to lessen his feat but just saying that luck is a big part of it.

[beambot]

Pareto principle applied to homework, study, and grades.

I spent way too much time worrying about grades. I'm not sure it mattered. It would have been just as good (and probably more enjoyable) to be a B-student with awesome side projects rather than an A-student with none.

(And often, esp. for college, one doesn't even need to make that trade-off when homework is largely immaterial, and your grade only depends on exams.)

[tedmiston]

I feel like everyone thinks this way in retrospect, but at the time it's so much harder. It's hard to accept not being at the top of everything even when you know they're just local maxima.

[nibs]

There was an HBS article about how both Microsoft and Facebook were started during Harvard reading week because putting all the smart people there and making them bored during time off resulted in productive projects. Trying to find it...

[L_Rahman]

Harvard is a notoriously easy school - once you get in classes are relatively easy. Grade inflation is rampant.

I say this as someone who got in (eventually chose to attend a different school for a variety of reasons) and with many friends who went there.

At Harvard, the primary thing you do is the extracurricular in your field of interest - whether that's law, activism or startups - is up to the individual student. Your grades, your education and your brand in society - Harvard takes care of that.

[perseusprime11]

I agree. Think if Friendster & Myspace were on top of things, they would have bested Facebook. What made them suscpetible for disruption?

[jomamaxx]

Friendster was a clumsy product.

MySpace was limited in features, and a fugly interface.

Neither had talented people.

Zuck started at Harvard. That was his core user base. The Ivy League. Basically marquis 'customers' in social.

Think of how massively that affected recruiting and attention? The network effect of Ivy League x 1000. It would have been trivial for him to get investment.

But in the end - forget culture - the basic features were just better, and for every great feature, there are 'smart things' happening internally that are good. Zuck deserves credit for that.

I used to work a little bit with MySpace. Their culture was 'LA Cool Kid' i.e. 'The Standard' hang-out types.

They reminded me of a Record Label - totally hip - totally useless. I feel sorry for any Engineer that had to work at MySpace.

If you knew the culture at Lycos, Excite etc. - and compare it to Google, it's a little bit of a similar story.

[doomlaser]

Yes, Facebook had better strategy. They embraced new tech to streamline the pain factor of navigating the website, whereas MySpace tried to optimize for discrete page views to serve more ads. MySpace would serve an entire interstitial page load with nothing but ads to get to different parts of its interface, whereas Facebook would embrace ways to jump to your friends' profiles or read your messages quickly, often without reloading the page.

It reminds me of how Google won the search engine war by delivering a more streamlined, less exploitative product.

And then of course there were a couple innovations that neither MySpace or Friendster had: photos with tags of your friends, and the concept of the News feed. It's hard to imagine a social network without those features, but they didn't exist before Facebook introduced them.

[perseusprime11]

Agreed. I think the larger point I was trying to make is there is always a bit of luck somewhere somehow that contributes to overall success. In the case of Facebook, it came in the form of lousy products such as Friendster and Myspace.

[Animats]

MySpace had a record label - "Myspace Records". Founded in 2006, ended somewhere around 2012.

[nickpsecurity]

He got to learn from Myspace and got to build Winklevoss's Harvard Connection for them. After that became great, he did some entirely new stuff thanks to his prepared mind... wait, no, he just ran off with others ideas to implement them himself on a bigger scale... stealing all the glory. Not in same category as Einstein or Shannon at all. ;)

[zouhair]

Imagine how much science would have Einstein done if he was sent to the camps. Of course luck is not everything but it is still a huge part of the equation. Just being born where he was born helped Pasteur a lot.

[azeirah]

You do not need to be extremely lucky to "make the world a better place". If that is truly your goal, you can definitely do that without building a startup, without getting extremely lucky, without spending 80 hours a week working on ideas.

I'm very much convinced that nearly everybody on this site who claims to want to make the world "a better place" just want to start their startup, earn their money and financial freedom, and tell themselves "they made the world a better place".

Snarky as fuck, yes indeed. I'm just beyond tired hearing all this bullshit, at least be honest with yourselves. If this does not apply to you, then it doesn't. If it does, please rethink your goals in life.

[smaddox]

I generally agree with your views. I think a large part of the problem is that we've all been (self) deluded into thinking technology can solve all our problems. The older I get, the clearer it becomes, though, that the root of all our problems is psychological. Outside of transhuman genetic engineering or human-replacing AI, I don't see how technology can fix our psychology.

[davidivadavid]

You can't see how technology can "fix" psychology?

The most obvious way is direct through e.g. drugs. There's a very wide spectrum of potential futures here from nootropics to brave-new-worldesque soma.

The less obvious way is that technology alters your surroundings, which in turn influence your psychology.

Neither scenario seems particularly implausible to me.

[smaddox]

The kind of psychological problems I'm talking about aren't the kind that are fixed by drugs. I'm talking about things like values and beliefs. I'm calling it psychology because I don't know what else to call it; perhaps mindset would be a better name.

[noobermin]

The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset when you fail if you were building something just to become the next Zuck.

This does contrast with pg's story, however.

[davidw]

For each and every bit of startup advice, there is an equal and opposite bit of startup advice.

[joshuacc]

> The good part is that if you are working on something you care about, you won't be as upset

This probably varies from person to person, but failing at something I care about would make me much more upset than failing at something I didn't really care about.

[mpbm]

I think he means if it's important to you it's still worth trying and if you fail at least you were trying. Whereas if it's just a business, "nothing personal," then failing means you've got nothing, not even the feeling of working on something important to you.

[janvdberg]

In this [1] Tim Ferris podcast Peter Thiel states about Zuckerberg (paraphrasing here): "the more time you spent with him the more you realise it is not luck."

[1]http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/

[sp527]

I think Zuckerberg's success had more to do with being able to identify valuable contributors and convince them to join the Facebook team. He isn't responsible for generating many of the important features or business decisions, though he certainly has to approve of them. In that way, his primary skillset is very similar to that of Jobs and other successful entrepreneurs.

[visakanv]

> He isn't responsible for generating many of the important features or business decisions, though he certainly has to approve of them.

Alternative way of framing this: Any CEO who is personally responsible for generating most of the important features or business decisions in his company is incompetent at hiring and delegating

[zouhair]

I'd call him being born in the US in a kinda wealthy family a huge amount of luck. I never said that what he did is a small feat, but let's be real if he was born in the slums of India none of his smart would have been useful.

[misiti3780]

nice find. i liked the comment at the end where he says he is optimistic because no all the great ideas have been found. i think if your in the start up game and have failed a lot of times you can start to feel that you were too late

[carlisle_]

This is true for pretty much every aspect of life though. I think massive success for an individual should already imply this.

[pystack]

The entrepreneur pits his willpower against the entropy of nature. Nature is huge and moves randomly, while the entrepreneur is small and moves purposefully.

There is definitely luck in nature's random movements. But the entrepreneur small purposeful movements add up over time and overcome nature.

[random314]

Zuckerberg actually understands that. So it is refreshing to see him receive advice from Sam[1], one of the five greatest founders in the past 40 years!

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

[thefastlane]

power and privilege help too.

[dang]

That they do, but the problem with taking the conversation in this direction is that it gets us all thinking in terms of how some people have had it easier, instead of what we can do that's valuable of our own.

[bayonetz]

I'd counter that taking it in this direction can actually help you get more honest with yourself about what value you can provide. For example, if you don't have wealth or privilege behind you, you may should maybe focus being the technical founder rather than the CEO in a start up situation. if you buy into the myth that everyone has an equal shot it can be quite discouraging and at the same time mystifying as to why things aren't working out. If you have a clear sense of ALL the inputs that your favorite startup success had going for it, then you can make informed decisions about what you have to offer and what you are likely capable given your particular set of inputs and resources.

[antar]

True but that doesn't mean someone shouldn't even mention it.

[dang]

It's more a question of how you mention it. The difference can have a big impact on the conversation. For example, snarky or cynical one liners produce more of the same, and so do thoughtful reflections. We're hoping for thoughtful reflections here.

[greysphere]

It also challenges people to think how to structure a society that maximizes peoples ability to work at this level. The folks who figure out how to put 'everyone' in a position to make successful startups with have contributed orders of magnitude more value to society than any single startup.

[z3t4]

If it takes 100 years for one man, it will only take a month for a company or community ... Some problems can't simply be fixed by one man alone. And it's better to own little of something then all of nothing ... Look at for example Elon Musk. He only owned like 5% of the companies he started once they where sold. Also Facebook only had a few thousand users when Zuckerberg started to bring more people in to work on it.

[yurisagalov]

> If it takes 100 years for one man, it will only take a month for a company or community.

This takes the mythical man month to a whole new level :)

[softawre]

I know you're joking, but in case it isn't obvious - Mythical man month doesn't apply outside dev. Sales/marketing people can actually deliver a baby in 4 weeks.

[qaq]

:) right so every public company can just double sales/marketing spending and it would double their revenue :)?

[z3t4]

There will always be diminishing returns ... But lets say you are spending money on Pay Per Click Advertising ...

[qaq]

As long as I am tiny player yes it would work as soon as I am meaningful in size after a short time it will just affect the PPC

[elmar]

One of many real world examples.

"In four months Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated Barnaby’s output as 42-man years."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12114185

[ben_jones]

In the case of Elon Musk (and for the record others like Mark Cuban) something tells me you don't make billions of dollars without a (from a modern perspective) massively disproportionate ownership share. Zuckerberg gets off from this because FB is an outlier in terms of it's value, he didn't need as large a percentage to make as much, but Musk does not.

[z3t4]

Musk owned like 11% of Paypal once it sold for 1.5B, while Zuckerberg owned around 20% of Facebook when it IPO:ed for like 5B. The takeaway though is that it's better to own 10% of one Billion then 90+% of nothing. And great things can only be achieved while working together.

[elmar]

Zuckerberg was lucky with a big jump on valuations on Series B Peter Thiel didn't invest because of the runaway valuation, later he regretted [1], and being a "Solo-Founder" :) if standard funding history with 2 co-founders Zuckerberg should have IPO with 5%~10% stake.

[1] "Biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook," http://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiels-bad-investment-2...

Equity in Startups - Cap tables at IPO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2134116

[ben_jones]

I stand corrected. It was my belief that he made much more from the acquisition because of how much I thought he put into SpaceX and later Tesla, and therefore would have had a much higher equity percent then 11%. He seems to have had a much higher business acumen then I thought [1] (not to say I didn't think it was already pretty high).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Zip2

[quaunaut]

That's when you've chosen too big a problem. Make it smaller. Find a piece you CAN solve. Then as you gain skill and power, expand. This works in every field.